Another Shoegaze Classic...

(USELESS) STATEMENT OF THE DAY: Loveless is one of the — ten, twenty? — albums that fundamentally defined my music taste.

Pretty commonplace, I know. That album has drastically oriented many, many people's musical inclinations. And you hear the My Bloody Valentine influence literally everywhere these days: No Age, Asobi Seksu, Deerhunter, M83, A Sunny Day in Glasgow, just a few names that immediately come to mind — but the list of heavily indebted bands goes on and on.

I remember finding Loveless in my dad's CD tower, one day (ninth grade?), as I was browsing his collection for some new stuff. I recognized the title from the countless "Greatest Rock Albums" lists I'd read and pretty much learned by heart. At that time, if I remember correctly, Lost in Translation was also set to come out, with a huge buzz surrounding the fact that MBV leader Kevin Shields was recording original material for the soundtrack.

I was a little surprised to find the album there because I had never heard my dad play it. Which meant it was one of those purchases he usually dismissed as mistakes, from bands that he invariably reduced to CRAP. I didn't know what to make of the cover, either: a guitar shrouded in pink haze? Cool, I guess.

I played the album on my stereo. WTF. A drum crash. Abrasive, repetitive riffs that sound kind of like… a buzz-saw concerto recorded in a tin-walled studio? A soft, sleepy voice, drowned in a dense fog of almost tuneless guitars and lethargic, watery backing vocals. All of it so deeply enveloped in haze that every sound, every note, feels unsteady, wavering between pitches and textures. About to collapse into something thick and indistinct. Definitely unlike anything I'd ever heard before.

I won't pretend I liked Loveless from the beginning. In fact, I was sorta disappointed. Or disoriented. But because I rarely admit defeat when it comes to music (and because I wanted to prove my dad wrong), I kept listening to the album pretty regularly in the months that followed.

In the end, I think the melodies did it for me. I found myself whistling a lot of the tunes I had first thought inept, relentless, almost childish. Once these had sunk in, a window opened onto what makes Loveless truly mind-blowing:

GUITARS

With melodies to cling onto, it became easier to take in the inscrutable piles of distortion, the incomprehensible swirls of conflicting sounds. I stopped trying to make sense out of it all; I let the music assume its own shape in my ears and patiently explored it.

What an exploration! Endless. Mystifying. If ever the experience of listening to an album deserved to be compared to deep-sea diving, then Loveless is surely it.

From Loveless I learned

- That the best albums are the ones who compose their own, idiosyncratic universes.

- That original production is absolutely crucial in crafting unique sound textures and sonic identities.

- That some of the most difficult albums can also, over time, become the most cosily inhabitable (make the most intimate nests for your ears).

- That the confrontation between pop and noise is by far the most gratifying, the most glorious, and endlessly fertile in the entire history of popular music.

- That fleeting, whispered and buried melodies are often — always? — the most beautiful and heartbreaking.

Finally, Loveless taught me that I preferred unpolished and aggressive sounds — noise, if you will — to their crisp and clear counterparts.

Take the "other" revolutionary pop masterpiece of the nineties, Radiohead's OK Computer. That album I bought myself and I did try very hard to love it. I'll admit it's a piece of musical genius and all. But so clean and clinical! The feelings that so many people experienced listening to Radiohead never made it through to me, because I immediately found the album overthought, over-controlled, over-exposed. There was just no space in OK Computer for mystery or uncertainty. Everything was there, clearly revealed, even underscored.

Noise — Loveless, however obsessively controlled the recording was for the album — on the other hand, leaves depths to be scanned. Layers to be peeled. A shifting and unsteady landscape that takes on new shapes with every listen. A haven for the imagination. Perhaps most importantly, a receptacle for any kind of emotion.